Page 47 of Echo: Burn
The last photo stops me cold. It's from the parking lot after the ambush—Willa and me, close enough that the body language says everything. The way I'm touching her face. The way she's looking at me. The intimacy unmistakable.
Beneath the photo, one sentence written in the same block letters:YOU CAN'T HIDE WHAT I'VE ALREADY FOUND.
"Kane?" Tommy's voice sounds distant. "What do you want me to do?"
I can't answer. Can't think past what I'm seeing. Someone watched us. Photographed us. Knows exactly where we are and what we mean to each other.
Willa's hand finds mine, squeezes hard. "We knew they were looking. We knew the Committee wouldn't stop."
"This isn't the Committee." The words come out rough. "This is personal. Someone who wants us to know we're being hunted. Who's patient enough to watch and wait instead of just putting a bullet through our heads."
"The stalker," she says quietly. "The enforcer. The one with ties to my father."
I turn to Tommy. "Pull every bit of intel we have on Gunnery Sergeant Hart. Deployment records, known associates, anyone who might've been with him in Yemen. Cross-reference with Committee contractors. I want to know who's hunting us by nightfall."
"On it."
I look back at the screen, at the photographs documenting our lives, our relationship, our vulnerability. The tactical ones I expected. But the photo from the parking lot—that moment I thought was private, just us. He invaded that.
"Mercer, bring everything back to base," I order. "And Mercer? Check for trackers. Whoever sent this might want to know when we retrieve it."
"Copy."
The screen goes dark as Mercer's body cam cuts out.
Willa leans against the console, exhaustion finally showing. "So what now?"
"Now?" I pull her against me, feel her heart beating too fast. "Now we figure out who's behind the camera. We find them before they find us. And we end this."
"How?"
"The same way we end everything." I press a kiss to her temple. "With violence and overwhelming force."
She almost smiles. Almost. "You really know how to show a girl a good time."
"Stick with me long enough, you'll get used to it."
"Kane." She pulls back, meets my eyes. "That warning you're about to give me—about how I'll never have peace if I stay with you, how I should leave before it's too late, how being together puts a target on my back—save it. I already know. And I'm staying anyway."
She says it like a fact. Like the decision's already made and nothing I say will change it. This woman has killed without hesitation, stitched my wounds while the Committee hunted her, looked at my scars and saw something worth keeping.
"You're stubborn," I tell her.
"So are you." She stands on her toes, kisses me hard. "Now let's go find out who's stupid enough to think surveillance photos will scare us off."
Tommy watches us leave. His face says what he's too smart to say out loud: he's seen what happens to civilians who get close to operators like me. Seen the body count.
But Willa's already proven she's not most civilians.
I don't sleep that night.
Can't. Every time I close my eyes, I see those photographs. Not the ones of Willa at her clinic or me at the cabin. The one from the parking lot. The way I was touching her face. The way she was looking at me. A moment I thought was ours.
Someone watched that. Documented it. Turned intimacy into intelligence.
I'm in the operations center very early, reviewing the surveillance photos for the hundredth time. Looking for details I missed. Angles that reveal the photographer's position. Anything that gives me a vector to hunt.
"You're going to burn your retinas staring at those screens."
